Contingent payments in procurement interactions: Experimental evidence

Jason Shachat, Matthew Walker and Lijia Wei

European Economic Review, 2024, vol. 170, issue C

Abstract: A primary objective of creating competition among suppliers is the procurement of higher quality goods and services at lower prices. When procuring non-standard goods, it is often difficult to write a complete specification of desired quality in the contract. Thus, payments to suppliers cannot be perfectly conditioned on the quality provided. We develop a simple model to distil several real-world features and illustrate how contract structure within price priority competition jointly affects bid aggression and incentives for the provision of surplus-enhancing quality. We implement the contingent payments as probabilistic. The selected supplier’s payment is, according to a fixed probability, either their bid or a quality contingent amount that depends on the bid and an exogenous norm for allocating social surplus. We use a lab experiment to show that there is a ‘Goldilocks’ region for high quality in which the probability of quality contingent payment is large enough to incentivize provision, but not so large as to induce overly aggressive bidding. This implementation only relies upon preferences for maximizing one’s own profit and the rationality of backward induction. An experimental finding not predicted in our setting is that suppliers earn positive economic profits inside the Goldilocks region, which can be explained by suppliers’ risk aversion. The results have implications for the effective design of contingent payments in contracts.

Keywords: Contingent payment; Procurement; Bidding; Risk aversion; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C92 D86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292124002150
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Contingent Payments in Procurement Interactions - Experimental Evidence (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:170:y:2024:i:c:s0014292124002150

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104886

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().